When, in the opening minutes of this one-act psychological thriller, a young woman wakes from a chloroform-induced sleep vomiting in a locked cellar, her kidnapper’s first move is to take her order for breakfast. Acting more like the proprietor of a superior B&B than a Lottery winner who has converted a secluded cottage in order to imprison the woman he is obsessed with, Frederick Clegg comes across like the creation of an especially dark comedic mind. That’s until you recall one particularly unsettling detail to emerge in the recent case of Austrian Josef Fritzl. He told police that in between the rape and torture his victims would ‘all sit down at the kitchen table and have a family meal’.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever understand Fritzl’s actions, but the socially awkward Clegg, played with just a hint of not-quite-rightness by Mark Fleischmann, is clearly desperate to ‘fit in’, a sensation he can only achieve by stealing a slice of normality and transfixing it within an almost scientifically controllable setting. At any rate, that’s the more convincing motivation here than his consuming, sexually repressed ‘love’ for Rosalind Drury’s Miranda, who is overacted, underwritten and, in any case, a bland, hair-flicking snob with a tedious crush on her art teacher. Mark Healy’s adaptation of John Fowles’s cult 1963 novel should be a big draw. But the only praiseworthy aspect of this tensionless production is Beck Rainford’s Laura Ashley-style set.
